“Your mother. How sweet. And weren’t you lucky to end up with a second mother in the end?”

I need a shower. I need to sleep. I do not need Jack and his games.

“You need to stop punishing Julia,” I say, and he laughs.

“You’re telling me what to do?”

“She doesn’t have much time left. You’ll regret it if you keep this anger up until the end.”

He puts his hand on my arm and I step away, bumping into the bed.

“Feeling jumpy, Tess? How come? Where were you, anyway?” He looks out of the window at the darkening sky. “Looking for the rest of the bodies you buried?”

“Fuck off, Jack.”

He laughs again. “You haven’t grown up much in the last ten years, have you?”

It’s this place, being back here with Jack and his brother, Max, Dad, and Julia. I swear I feel myself regressing by the day.

“I’ve grown up more than you,” I say. “I’m not some silly girl in the woods anymore, scared of the big bad wolf. At least I’m not still bearing a grudge from more than a decade ago.”

“Aren’t you? Aren’t you still carrying around all the baggage from ten years ago? Isn’t that why your drawer is full of sleeping pills and you still have fairy tales on your bookshelf and morbid reminders of your sister everywhere you look?”

“Go and talk to her,” I say, pushing him toward the door. “Go and talk to your mother while you still have the chance.”

I slam the door behind him and collapse onto the bed. Damn him. How long was he in my room? I look around and see my bedside drawer half-open. I still have the unopened box of sleeping pills the doctor prescribed. I get them out of the drawer and read the label. Will she come back? Will I dream of Bella again if I take these pills? Or will a medicated sleep push her away? Tears burn my eyes. It feels like I’m killing her, like she’s going to die all over again if I take a pill and sleep properly. I know it’s not real, I know I need to get well, but I don’t want to say goodbye to her again.

I lie down, curled on my side, the pill box clutched in my hand, and I feel her curl up behind me, like she used to do sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. Her hand touches my hair and I close my eyes.

“Tess? Tess.”

Someone’s shaking me, grabbing my arm, pulling me out of the house, but I’ll have to go back through the woods then, oh please don’t make me go through the woods…

“Wake up, come on. It’s time to wake up.”